War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
Being scared of being scared is pretty frightful, and more than a little neurotic. On this early Friday morning as I tap the soft keys of my laptop, the US is involved at least three major war zones — Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya — while at the same time being wrapped up in drone missions,…
“You can’t be afraid of words that speak the truth. I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth,…
As these modern times gets more complicated, the ability of government to stare way-down into your bowels to catch a terrorist turd has come a long way, baby, and the future of freedom doesn’t appear too inconspicuous, either. In fact, any private aspect of our daily lives is open to be scrutinized, filmed, recorded and…
“There is a distance, a veil between us.” — ‘All Quiet On The Western Front,’ Erich Maria Remarque (Illustration found here). War as waged nowadays — slipshod and way-unnecessary — kills in ways way-beyond the flesh. The US has destroyed a certain of segment of its population, a big chunk, in waging nasty, cruel and…
“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.” – George Orwell, 1984 (Illustration found here). The US Department of Homeland Security (a near-perfect Orwellian title) via its Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in a $3.5 million study is seeking…
The CIA along with all the US intelligence agencies were caught with their panties down on Tunisia and Egypt: “These events should not have come upon us with the surprise that they did,†the committee‘s chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat, said in an interview. “There should have been much more warning†of the revolts…
During these uprisings across northern Africa, a lot of talk has been about national security, or the nearly-mechanical catch-phrase, “police apparatus,’ which is just a soft-lotion locution for an ugly, nefarious secret cop operation. All strong-armed, dictator regimes must have these organizations or they couldn’t exist for very long — the Soviets had the old…
As one can see via the uprising in Egypt, a government has the power to shut down communications, or at least try and control access to transmissions of whatever information to wherever — CNN reported earlier this morning, Egypt’s information ministry took the country offline with the shutting down of the Noor Group, an Internet…
According to a review of official documents, the FBI have compromised the civil liberties of American citizens far more frequently, and to a greater extent, than was previously assumed, and more-over, the actual number of violations that may have occurred from 2001 to 2008 could approach 40,000 possible violations of law, Executive Order, or other…
Dystopia from Wikipedia: Dystopian literature has underlying cautionary tones, warning society that if we continue to live how we do, this will be the consequence. A dystopia, thus, is regarded as a sort of negative utopia and is often characterized by an authoritarian or totalitarian form of government. Dystopias usually feature different kinds of repressive…